Link Baiting with Images
This is a quick post about how to link bait sites with your images.
I take lots of photographs and publish some to the web. Sure, enough, with time they get hot-linked from MySpace and forums. The people that hotlink NEVER credit you for the photo, so don’t expect a text link back to your site. So all you get is the image link.
The benefit is that you get a back link which helps your image ranking in Google Images, the downside is that your bandwidth is consumed each time the image is displayed on the other sites.
So how can we optimize this to our advantage?
Use a keyword for the image name.
This is most important I think since the hot-linker may be too dumb to put relevant text next to the image or use an ALT tag.
For example: keyword-phrase.jpg
Minimise the file size of the image and make the image dimensions ideal for inclusion in forum posts. So we minimise our bandwidth hit and steer them towards using a medium-sized image rather than a large version.
Add your domain name to the image.
This should get a few curious people typing in your URL to their browser to look for more pictures like the one they are viewing.
To be really sneaky, you could maybe use a PHP script and .htaccess to add this text to the image only when it is hot linked. And add a small watermark to the large image to put them off linking to that one. If I do this myself at some stage I will publish the code on this blog but it is a bit OTT for my liking right now.
Help the image get found.
This is what I do. I have a separate blog where I post on random topics which is ideal for posting keyword optimised posts to bring attention to the image.
The URL of the post, the title and opening paragraph all have the keywords in them. And these keywords are like the keywords for the photo. I also add a relevant “tag” to the post.
When I publish the post, it is pinged to technorati etc. where scrapers and others are monitoring this tag and come on over to my post to scrape and hot-link etc. Plus the image should get a good chance of being picked up in image searches.
Ideal link bait images are sexy girls and funny pictures. You can probably edit pictures of animals to make them funny. Privacy laws may be an issue where you are showing people’s faces so you may want to photograph their fat butt instead 
So I hope this gives you some ideas. This seems to be the easiest way to generate link bait to me, although it’s not ideal from a page rank building perspective, it is one way to get curious traffic from people seeking more “information” on a topic.
Also, when your images have been hot linked plenty of times and the forum posts have aged, you can 301 redirect the location of the images to your other sites and maybe change the images to include Ad text and reduce the resolution further to conserve bandwidth.
Here is an example of how I implemented this technique for the keyword Sexy Teacher - just let your creative juices flow and don’t simply copy my example! Try crazy dog or sexy granny etc.
Some ideas to take this further are to have a pop-up window when your image is clicked with cut and paste code for forums etc. This will help you get the kind of link you are after. You can use small text for your back-link so that they are likely to keep it.
Then, maybe create a gallery of your link bait photos.
Tags: link bait
